Articles: Perigo, Lindsay

With my sister Sally and her husband John—with whom I’ve been living since renting out my own apartment recently— away for the weekend, I would have the place to myself, free of distractions. As I emerged from my bedroom, I was momentarily disconcerted to see the lounge curtains drawn when I was sure I hadn’t drawn them. (Read more...)Discuss this Article(29 messages)

Likely those of us who’ve been around Objectivism for a while have met one or more of them. If we see one coming we cross the road or hide behind a tree. If we see one at a table we sit at another. Willingly to expose ourselves to him would be an act of masochistic self-sacrifice. (Read more...)Discuss this Article(19 messages)

Daily Linz has been less than "daily" this week and last, on account, as explained, of my being immersed in the upcoming Free Radical. I can report that this issue will KASS even more than most! Lead article is an interview with the world's first "Political Correctness Eradicator." What a hopelessly confused weasel-worder he shows himself to be! There's an exclusive article by Casey Fahy, The Silence of Ayn Rand's Critics, guaranteed to cause wailing and gnashing of teeth. ...(Read more...)Discuss this Article(38 messages)

There were no false pretences between us, just an appreciation of our commonalities and a lot of humorous banter about our differences. Goodbye, Young Donald! I may be damned to hell for saying it, but I shall miss you. (Read more...)Discuss this Article(4 messages)

Political Correctness-loathers everywhere may be interested to learn that New Zealand’s National Party, which came within a whisker of winning power in the recent general election, has appointed the world’s first Political Correctness Eradicator. (Read more...)Discuss this Article(48 messages)

As Objectivists, we should hold the thought that Pythagoras’ doctrines were to resurface in Plato—to devastating effect. While there is no denying his groundbreaking, fruitful brilliance, the fact that his discoveries were steeped in mysticism set the scene for Plato’s full-on rationalism and intrinsicism, with everything that implied for the future of Western thought and civilisation. (Read more...)Discuss this Article(14 messages)

Michael wants to do his bit in ushering in the age of the soft-sell and bringing an end to religion-“bashing.” Well, if he were advocating clarity without dogmatism, KASS without hysteria, reasonableness without appeasement, I would agree with him. But as far as I can tell, he’s pitching for an Objectivism that is New-Aged to the point where it is not only unrecognisable as Objectivism, but is antithetical to it. (Read more...)Discuss this Article(122 messages)

SOLOists, savour this guy. He is a KASS-NEM par excellence. He will have a place of honour in Objectivist history. He is living proof that the heroes in Ayn Rand’s novels not only can exist, but do exist. (Read more...)Discuss this Article(47 messages)

Parmenides figured Heraclitus and the Milesians had got it right about there being a “fundamental stuff,” but they were wrong about what it was. It was one thing, but it was everything. As the Musketeers might have put it, all was one and one was all. (Read more...)Discuss this Article(12 messages)

I normally enjoy writing my Daily Linzes. I have not enjoyed writing this one. Normally anything I say about the pholk on Regi’s site is a piss-take, to which they seem incapable of reacting humorously. But certain seriously misleading things are being repeated and repeated there that bear serious rebuttal—which I have now, reluctantly, furnished. For the record. (Read more...)Discuss this Article(28 messages)

Last night I watched New Zealand Idol for the first time. It was the penultimate programme in this, the second series. Nick probably has the thing sewn up, so to speak, if only on the grounds of sex appeal. Rosita has the superior instrument in the voice department, but gyrating whale is just not a good look. The loser in all of this is music. (Read more...)Discuss this Article(16 messages)

It’s Friday—a day when many of us like to let our hair down after the rigours of a working week, a day when I like to remind myself in a meaningful way of Oscar Wilde’s immortal aphorism, “Work is the curse of the drinking classes.” Today and on future Fridays, rather than focus on a single topic, I propose to wrap up some themes of the week in a manner that won’t always embody the importance of being earnest. (Read more...)Discuss this Article(9 messages)

In the first installment in this series we acquainted ourselves with Western man’s first fitful philosophical gropings—with the Milesians, who wrestled with the question of, what was the “fundamental stuff” of the universe? We noted that the importance of this inquiry lay not so much in the answers posited, but in the ... (Read more...)Discuss this Article(4 messages)

I hope that SOLO will continue to be a repository of open debate among the factions, without ceasing to be a scourge of such evils as postmodernism, relativism, Political Correctness, the Cult of Uncertainty and all the rest of the ghastly contemporary sewer whose pusball representatives I finally flamed here recently. I hope that it will continue to accommodate dissent without blunting its polemical edge, the KASS factor. I hope that its vision, set forth in the Credo, will survive and prosper from all the tumult and the shouting. I hope that the end result will be a noisy world full of Objectivists, all talking animatedly to each other whatever their disagreements! (Read more...)Discuss this Article(14 messages)

Peikoff’s answer to the question, “Why choose life?” reads to me like, “Because it’s there, so you must.” Mine would be, “There’s no intrinsic ‘why,’ short of a powerful biological urge which I’m free to accept or reject; there’s no a priori categorical imperative saying you must choose life—so find your own ‘why’ and speak for yourself." (Read more...)Discuss this Article(88 messages)

Islam itself is a malignancy on the body of humanity. The actions of its consistent, true practitioner-maggots demonstrate that. But Bush can’t afford to say it. He himself is in thrall to a vicious religion that seems benign only because it has lost its political power—and under his Administration threatens to reclaim it. The President is undone by his own contradictions. Objectivists must point this out, loudly and relentlessly. (Read more...)Discuss this Article(9 messages)

We see pusballs gatecrashing on SOLOHQ. Their stock-in-trade is ambiguity, uncertainty, “well yes, but ...,” “not necessarily”—verbal clutter and entropy. They slither around in what Ayn Rand would call the “hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all.” Under the guise of “critical thinking,” they commit to nothing, and try to cast doubt on everything. (Read more...)Discuss this Article(77 messages)

Our civilisation is organically healthy but culturally sick. To diagnose the illness, we need to examine the ideas that impregnate and poison the culture. What are the accepted answers to questions such as, What is the nature of the universe? What is the nature of man? What does that nature dictate, if anything, as to how man should live? Should man live? Ideas at this level of fundamentality we call philosophy, and it will help our diagnosis to trace philosophy’s history. (Read more...)Discuss this Article(13 messages)

The cliché is true -- youth is primarily and enduringly a state of mind. Above infirmities and deformities notwithstanding, I constantly assume, with no conscious effort to do so, that I have an entire lifetime ahead of me still, and am astonished, not to mention a little annoyed, when I am reminded that fifty-three years have already elapsed. How can this be, when I’m just getting started? In any event, this is a promise (warning?) that y’ain’t seen nuttin’ yet. (Read more...)Discuss this Article(18 messages)

I was one of those who resolved not to read James Valliant’s book, The Passion of AynRand’s Critics, openly touted as “The case against the Brandens.” Still, I got talked into reading it in a thread right here on SOLOHQ. And I’m glad I did. (Read more...)Discuss this Article(378 messages)

I will not let my fire go out—or allow anyone to extinguish it—"spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all." (Read more...)Discuss this Article(99 messages)